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Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0: World Wide Web and its future

The need and the speed of information exchange in the modern world has reached those volumes, that allow us to speak about a new era of Internet development, making it suitable to sum up what we have witnessed and what we are to see in the near future. As new technologies and techniques are coming up, the attitude to the Internet also changes, requiring timely steps to be taken to stand the test of time and new trends. In this posting you will read basic characteristics of phenomena named web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues suggested the programming language for World Wide Web, which was implemented and initiated the development of what today is known as Internet. As the Internet developed, Web 1.0 proved itself to be static, commercially driven and inflexible.

The idea behind Web 2.0 is the next step in WWW development. There are several reasons for Web 2.0 to appear. Full list of informational resources, services, products, interest fields and internet groupings is today so huge, that an internet user wants to orient himself in the ocean of information and have a start point where resources, necessary for him, would be gathered in one place. The simplest example is the Google personalized page, where a user can put together specific news blocks, weather forecast for a selected region, have instant access to multiple blogs updates. Ajax technologies, RSS, XML make it possible to personalize the home page on the fly without programming knowledge. What we are witnessing today is a shift from static pages and overloaded search engines towards interactive, dynamic, targeted, human edited resources delivering search specific results at the shortest time. Web 2.0 is characterized by de-centralization of authoritative resources, where information and data become leading factors. It basically a self-adapting system initiated, supported and referred by internet users.

Web 3.0 is in its embryo stage now, but nevertheless carries ideas that have a bright future. There should not be a place for skepticism in the world of Internet, people could hardly believe that Internet would become what it is today 15 years ago. User beneficial ideas get implemented, and do it fast. It is not easy to believe that one day we will be able to access any information as easily as an apple at arm’s length, but that is what Web 3.0 ultimately offers.

Web 3.0 (or semantic web) suggests that there is a better way to organize and deliver information than just match the keywords. The idea deals with artificial intelligence and its development, but not only. Web 3.0 proponents believe that current state of search engines’ work is far from being perfect and it is destined to be substituted by more intelligent solutions that are to appear in the near future. This approach is promising but is still not even in its alfa version.

So the question remains: whether Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are new stage of World Wide Web development, or just a new trend that will never bother some webmasters or internet-based businesses in their work. Unfortunately the only person who can give us a sure answer is Mr. Time and it looks like he is still not available.